The first car that I bought in London in 1962, with my own hard-earned money, was a mini. Way back in the 1960s the mini was as much of a novelty as the mini-skirt, though not quite as sexy. I drove it with as much flourish as I could muster until a well-wisher pointed out that, apart from petrol, the car needed occasional refills of oil and water.

Petrol stations in England used to have attendants though not quite as efficient and as many as we have in our country. I like the system we have. As soon as you arrive at a service station, a platoon of men in grey uniforms, holding thick wads of hundred rupee notes in one hand, rush towards you. One of them takes the key to the petrol cap from your hand and, after artfully extracting whatever petrol is left in your tank, fills it up, locks the petrol cap and hands over the key to you. They tend to call your needs. You need never to step out of your car.

In England, you have to leave the warmth of your car, get the nozzle out of its resting place and stand quivering in blistery wind, wondering why it takes so long to fill the tank. When will they invent a machine which allows the flow of petrol into the tank without your having to exert so much finger pressure? After what seems to be hours you go inside the store to pay for the petrol. The cashier asks you the number of your pump and this is where I nearly always get stumped. It never occurs to me to memorise the number, and so I sheepishly brave the snow-storm, or the showery sleet, to go and look at the damned number.

But all this pales, so to speak, beside the case of my first car. One day I pulled up at a service station and asked the attendant (self-service had not yet crept in) to check the oil and water. "Open up your bonne, mate," he said, casually.

Now I should have asked the man who called me ‘mate’, to tell me how to perform this elementary operation but I felt too embarrassed to admit that no one had ever taught me how to open the bonnet. The bonnet, I was under the impression, was one of those things that only a mechanic dealt with. "Actually, I am getting rather late. I’ll have it seen to another time", I murmured, and bolted.

My readers are not unaware of my ineptitude towards machines and machinery. I have been driving a car for more than half a century but I still do not know what exactly the function of a carburettor is. I am utterly at a loss when a light bulb gets fused and, much to my shame, I have yet to acquire the knack of recording a programme on my video-tape. I wait for an eight-year-old.

When I started my collection of videotapes I labelled the name of the programme -- even the duration -- on all the tapes before lining up them up on shelves. But the day I discovered that the tape marked Citizen Kane showed a documentary on Trappist Monks, and the tape marked Trappist Monks turned out to be Tom and Jerry cartoons, I never bothered to relabel anything.

The world is divided into two kinds of people. There are those who always wind a tape before putting it back in its precise place on the shelf and those who leave it in the machine, or put it away on the nearest table without thinking about it.

There are those who, when taking money from a bank teller, count the money (even though the teller has counted it expertly in their view) before placing it in an envelope and then putting it away in some inner pocket, and those who stuff it in their back pocket immediately as though there is a risk of being asked for it back.

There are those who cannot pass a mirror without stealing a look at themselves (I am not talking about ladies who will stop to check the arch of their eyebrows), and those who cannot pass a mirror without looking the other way.

There are those who rip open the wrapping paper of a gift and those who spend hours fighting their way through bits of scotch tape so that the wrapping paper can be-reused.

There are those who can never remember the names of the stars of a film they saw some years ago, and those who not only remember the name of each and every star, but also the names they were given in the movie. When recalling the story they only refer to the name of the star: "Then, Ashok Kumar says to Meena Kumari…" thus confirming my hypothesis that a subcontinental movie star need never play anything but himself.

There are those who wait patiently while you finish reading your newspaper and fold it before asking if they can have a look at it, and those who ask you to let them have a look at the middle pages while you are reading the front page.

There are those who think "Thou lump of foul deformity" to be insolent and degrading and those who think it to be a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III.

There are those who have worked out which two books they would keep in the last week of their lives, but haven’t made a will, and those who see to it that every spoon, every ashtray is bequeathed to so and so long before they are ready to depart.

There those who think that Zafar Altaf is a contemporary poet and those who think that he has something to do with cricketing affairs.

There are those who, when they finish viewing a programme on television turn off the tele, take the plug out of the socket and cover the set with a proper cover, and those who press a button on the remote control to switch it off and walk away unconcerned about the hazards of electricity.

I cannot end this column without mentioning that when waiting for the traffic lights to change, some husbands cannot help looking at the female driver who has pulled up next to their car. They are accused of possessing the glad eye by their spouses, but those husbands who try ever so hard not to look are dubbed as hypocrites by their wives. This is one splendid example of a phenomenon about which the world is not divided.